Friday, August 30, 2013

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 28.)

It received very little coverage in the New Zealand
media, but for six months this year the New South Wales Independent Commission
Against Corruption conducted an inquiry into extremely dodgy dealings involving
former ministers in the NSW state government.

The commission presented its findings to the New South Wales
Parliament several weeks ago. It found that two former Labor Party ministers,
Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald, had engaged in corrupt conduct involving the
issue of lucrative coal mining licences.

In a nutshell, the commission alleges that Obeid – a former
powerbroker in the right wing of the faction-ridden NSW Labor Party – acquired several
rural properties over which the state government subsequently issued a coal exploration
lease. Macdonald was the Minister of Mining at the time.

Obeid’s family and friends were in on the deal too. They
made an estimated $30 million not only from selling the land, but also by
investing in the company that eventually won the mining exploration licence
over the area – a very tidy little arrangement.

The commission heard that Lebanese-born Obeid, whose
political career was repeatedly dogged by allegations of sleaze in one form or
another, had advance knowledge of the exploration lease and influenced the
mining licence process.

There was an enormous amount of colourful background detail
which I won’t go into here, other than to mention that the commission also heard
that former champion boxer Lucky Gattellari and a wealthy property developer
named Ron Medich provided Macdonald with a prostitute named Tiffanie (he was
given a choice of four) in an attempt to secure favours from the government.

In an unrelated action, Gattellari is the key witness in a
court case in which police allege Medich ordered the 2009 murder of a former business
associate.

Meanwhile the commission is concluding a separate inquiry
into claims relating to another mining licence granted by Macdonald to a
company chaired by a mate who was a former trade union boss.

Google some of the names involved in this saga and you are
led into a labyrinthine network of connections between politics and crime. In Australia,
and especially in Sydney, the boundaries between the two worlds are often
blurred.

When we hear of corruption we tend to think of Chicago and
New York, but there’s very little the Americans could teach our trans-Tasman
neighbours about graft and political fixing (or police corruption, come to
that). The mere fact that NSW has had a permanent commission investigating
claims of corruption since 1988 speaks volumes.

From a New Zealand perspective, all this seems extraordinary. We're a lily-white lot by comparison. The only New Zealand politician to be convicted of corruption is former Labour Party
minister Taito Phillip Field, whose offence – getting a tiler from Thailand to
work for him on the cheap in return for help with a work permit – wouldn’t
cause so much as a raised eyebrow across the Ditch.

A scandal on the scale of the Obeid affair is unheard of
here and would cause a sensation. But Sydneysiders are so inured to allegations
of corruption that they take it in their stride.

All of which raises an intriguing question.
Why, when Australia and New Zealand have so much in common, are they so
different from one another in this respect?

Criminality is deeply embedded in Australian culture. It not
only intrudes into politics but crosses over into trade union affairs too.

I once interviewed Norm Gallagher, head of the militant Builders
Labourers Union in Melbourne. There was intense rivalry between the Victorian
and NSW branches of the union at the time, and while I was with Gallagher he
took a phone call supposedly warning him that a contract had been taken out on his life
and a hit man was on his way from Sydney. Gallagher, who seemed unfazed, showed
me a loaded shotgun that he kept behind his office door for such contingencies.

The Melbourne office of the Sydney newspaper I worked for at
the time was in the same street as the docklands headquarters of the notorious Federated
Ship Painters and Dockers Union, which was essentially a front organisation for
criminals. I recall driving past on the day of the union elections and seeing
men openly packing shotguns.

Not long after that, Pat Shannon, the union secretary, was
shot dead in a South Melbourne pub. It was a professional hit – a relatively
common event in Melbourne then. Melbourne was a very violent city, as it has
been again in recent years, and many of the gangland feuds could be traced to members
of the Painters and Dockers Union.

Here’s another intriguing thing about Australian crime: the
people in the thick of it are often migrants, or the children of migrants.

In the 1960s one of the kingpins of the Sydney underworld
was Malta-born Perce Galea, a devout Catholic whose power was based on gambling
rackets. Another Maltese criminal, Joe Borg, owner of a string of brothels, was
killed in 1968 by a car bomb, detonated when he turned on the ignition of his
Holden ute in Bondi.

These days the bad guys are more likely to be Lebanese,
Italian, Serbian, Albanian or Asian (although we shouldn’t forget that when the
Mr Asia drug syndicate was at its most active in the 1970s, the most violent criminals
in Australia were New Zealanders).

New Zealand has immigrant communities too. Nelson and
Wellington, for example, have substantial populations of Italian descent, but they
are untainted by criminal associations. On the contrary, they are respected as
honest, hard-working and community-minded.

Contrast that with Robert Trimbole’s murderous Mafia drug
ring in the marijuana-growing New South Wales town of Griffith, or the Italian-dominated Carlton
Crew gang formed by Alphonse Gangitano in Melbourne.

To explain the difference, we may have to look to history.
We make jokes about Australians having convict ancestry, but there may well be something in their collective heritage that makes them more tolerant
of crime and corruption.

Australia’s very first settlers, after all, were taken there
as punishment, against their will. New Zealand, on the other hand, was
colonised by people who came of their own volition and were motivated by a
powerful desire to create a better society than the one they had left behind.

You have to wonder whether those contrasting origins have
left permanent imprints on the two countries.

Monday, August 26, 2013

YOU MAY not have heard of the veteran British actor Steven
Berkoff. He hasn’t had an especially illustrious career on screen: mostly minor
parts, often playing villains. His most notable work has been in the theatre.

But Berkoff said something recently that must have resonated
with anyone who struggles to see merit in the strange phenomenon known as
Twitter.

In Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, Berkoff gave an
interview in which he poured scorn on people who post their thoughts on Twitter
and then recoil in horror when Internet trolls – the malevolent misfits who
infest social media looking for people to attack – inevitably turn on them.

“There’s a lot of talk about people being abused on Twitter,
women being savagely insulted and degraded,” Berkoff said. “I think, why get
into that in the first place? If I jump into a garbage bin, I can’t complain
that I’ve got rubbish all over me.”

Warming to his subject, he went on: “It [Twitter] is like a
river of filth. If you jump into that river, you are going to be contaminated.”

He made the comment in the midst of a media storm over rape
threats on Twitter against the feminist Caroline Criado-Perez, who had
campaigned (successfully, as it happens) for Jane Austen to replace Charles
Darwin on the £10 banknote from 2017.

Labour MP Stella Creasy, who supported Criado-Perez, also received
death and rape threats, including one accompanied by an image of a masked
serial killer from the Halloween
horror film series.

This was seriously creepy behaviour – the more so when you
consider it was over something as unexceptionable as a woman author’s image on
a banknote.

But as Berkoff tried to point out, it’s par for the course on
Twitter, a medium that provides a perfect platform for psychopaths and
embittered nobodies. Twitter is a gift to such people because by enabling them
to remain anonymous, it confers a sense of power without personal risk.

The most bizarre aspect of the affair was that Criado-Perez,
Creasy and other feminists – including the British Left’s
columnist-of-the-moment, Caitlin Moran – turned on Berkoff as if he were trying
to suppress their right of free speech.

All he was doing was pointing out the obvious: that Twitter
can be a cesspit. As noble as the ideal of free speech is, it’s idle to expect
that the Neanderthal trolls on Twitter will show any respect for it.

Demanding the right to exercise one’s freedom of speech on Twitter
is like asserting the right to self-expression by strolling into a
fundamentalist mosque in northwest Pakistan wearing a bikini. The best you could hope for would be a fleeting moment of
satisfaction, knowing you’d struck a blow for individual rights, before you
were decapitated.

* * *

EVEN MORE perplexing than feminists’ insistence on their right
to attract rape threats, and infinitely more tragic, is the addiction of
vulnerable teenagers to social media sites where they are taunted and
humiliated, sometimes to the point of suicide.

The Latvian-based website ask.fm seems to be the principal
offender. The deaths of four British teenagers have been linked to the site,
which allows semi-literate trolls to place vicious messages such as “go die u
pathetic emo” and “u ugly – go die evry1 wuld be happy”.

The solution, for any teenager being victimised, seems
blindingly obvious: just don’t go there. But they seem incapable of tearing
themselves away.

Here’s the bewildering thing. Affected teenagers seem
gripped by an addictive malaise which, like self-mutilation and eating
disorders, defies logical explanation (as does the unrelenting malice of the
perpetrators).

This is the dark side of the digital revolution. The
Internet may have empowered people by providing access to information on a
scale never before imagined, but it has also created unforeseen opportunities
for those bent on doing harm.

* * *

IN THE COURSE of deleting hundreds of spam emails from my
computer recently, I noticed a peculiar thing.

A large proportion promised ways to shed weight, backed by
the irreproachable authority of celebrities such as Britney Spears, Beyoncé and
Jenifer Aniston. Paradoxically, others
held out the prospect of miraculous weight gain – but only in a part of my anatomy that propriety
precludes me from mentioning.

These things seem to go in cycles. For a long time, most of
my spam emails purported to be from various banks and urged me, in comically
bad English, to click on a link so that I could remedy a pressing problem with
my account.

Those have now abated, to be replaced by emails assuring me that
with an enlarged mumble-mumble, I will induce paroxysms of ecstasy in my sexual
partners.

The really worrying thing is that obviously, enough mugs
respond to these emails to make the spammers’ efforts worthwhile.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 14.)

When I was a novice reporter in Wellington, my duties
including covering what was then called the Magistrate’s Court (now known as the
District Court).

Naturally, I got to know some of the magistrates – not
personally, you understand; they were far too magisterial for that. But by
observing them from the press bench I did become familiar with their habits and
idiosyncrasies.

The regular magistrates included J A Wicks (they were always
referred to by their initials in those days), D J Sullivan and M B Scully.

Mr Wicks – later to become Sir James – had glasses and wispy
hair. He was quietly spoken and gave the impression of being a kindly man, but
he brooked no nonsense.

Mr Sullivan (later to become Sir Desmond, and chief judge of
the District Court), was younger and less aloof. He seemed a sympathetic type
and I wasn’t surprised to read in his obituary in 1996 that he believed in
giving people a second chance.

Mr Scully, known by everyone as Ben (but not to his face),
was a different proposition. He was short and pugnacious and had a reputation
as being irascible and unforgiving.

Everything about Ben Scully, from his choleric complexion to
the impatient way he strode into court, as if he couldn’t wait to pack the
first miscreant of the day off to prison, gave warning that he was not a man to
be messed with.

Lawyers were intimidated by Ben Scully, and any defendant
who made the mistake of antagonising him soon regretted it. Barristers old
enough to remember him still mention his name with something approaching awe,
although away from court he was apparently regarded with affection as well as
respect.

Magistrates in those days were lords of their domain and you
forgot that at your peril. Even reporters on the press bench took care to
behave with decorum.

I was reminded of that era last week when I read an excerpt
from a new book called Grumpy Old Men,
in which Auckland District Court judge Russell Callander sounds off about some
of the things that irritate him. No, make that many of the things that irritate him.

Judge Callander is in his 70s and sounds like a throwback to
those magistrates I recall from the late 1960s. His is a magnificent rant that
will warm the hearts of curmudgeons everywhere. Allow me to quote some of the
juicier bits:

■ “People who
dress badly when they appear in court can make me tetchy. Courts are solemn
places: not the beach or the public bar of the local boozer.”

■ “Epidermal
self-mutilation with grotesque ill-drawn graphics so frequently flaunted by
defendants, their associates, and witnesses are most irritating. When a man can’t
even successfully spell four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, it makes me worry either
about the standards of teaching in our schools, or the intelligence quotient of
some of our more delinquent citizens.”

■ “Certain
guilty paedophiles selfishly elect trial by jury on serious charges of sexual
violation of children. They force innocent children to testify about traumatic
and sensitive sexual issues in the usually futile hope a jury will acquit. They
deny their offending. They lie through their fangs. And then, after being
sentenced to imprisonment, they confess all to a prison psychologist and ask
for a rehabilitation programme and the earliest possible release date.”

■ “Benefit
bludgers and tax cheats make me growl with indignation. When people improperly
take benefits, they steal from the state – from the rest of us who obediently
pay our taxes. I have seen people live cheerfully in well-paid jobs while for
years they supplement that with unemployment benefits totalling thousands of
dollars – in one case nearly $100,000. Often they have the cheek to look very
disgruntled when they are caught, convicted and ordered to pay it all back.
Then, adding insult to injury, they smile sweetly and offer to pay it back at
$15 per week over the next 128 years. Naturally, without interest.”

■ “A huge
amount of court time is wasted by Maori activists who profess that Maori
sovereignty renders them somehow immune to the laws of New Zealand.”

■ “Over the years I have dealt with
scores of men who have fathered children and then totally abdicated any
responsibility for them. They don’t provide any financial help. They don’t play
any parental role. They are selfish, uninterested, inhuman and irresponsible.
They deserve the condemnation of us all.”

■ “And then there are the liars, the
perjurers, the fabricators and prevaricators. Gone are the days when people
admitted their crimes and told the truth. The oath is mainly meaningless. The
mantra is ‘Get off the hook by any means’. It is shameful and destructive. It
makes me not just grumpy but angry.”

I find it hugely refreshing and encouraging that a judge
should throw political correctness to the wind and so vigorously express
sentiments felt by many of his fellow New Zealanders.

I wonder if there’s a trend building here – an overdue
backlash against misguided tolerance of bad behaviour and disrespectful antics
in the courts.

In the same week that I read Judge Callander’s
expostulations, another District Court judge, Judge Russell Collins, delivered
a scalding judgment in the case of lawyer Davina Murray, who was found guilty
of smuggling contraband to Mt Eden prison inmate Liam Reid, a convicted
murderer and rapist with whom she was having a relationship.

Murray obviously got right up Judge Collins’ nose during the
trial, and he didn’t hold back. He castigated her for turning up late in court,
repeatedly talking over himself and witnesses, playing up to the media benches while
she was being addressed from the Bench and making gratuitous comments after rulings
had been given against her. At one point, Judge Collins was moved to remind
Murray that she wasn’t in an American television show.

Courts are institutions of the people and deserve to be
treated with respect. We should applaud Judges Callander and Collins for making
a stand against those who abuse their dignity.

They will stand alongside Hawke’s Bay judge Tony Adeane –
who in 2008 declared that he wasn’t going to have his court turned into a
circus and packed a man off to the cells for 24 hours after he made a gesture
to a mate in the dock – in my own judicial hall of fame.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

IT’S NO exaggeration to say that for some of my generation, the 1981
Springbok tour was as much the defining event of their lives as the 1939-45 war
had been for their parents.

Over 56 days, they rose up in a cathartic rebellion that gathered
momentum as the tour progressed.

The anti-tour protests brought to a head all the frustrations and
resentments of a baby-boomer generation that had chafed through two decades of
conservatism and conformity, topped off by the snarling authoritarianism of
Robert Muldoon.

It was more than just a protest against apartheid. It was an emphatic
rejection of the values of the old New Zealand – values associated with the
short-back-and-sides generation that ran the rugby union and the RSA.

For many of the protesters, raised in middle-class comfort in the
suburbs, confronting police skirmish lines was the closest they had come, or
were ever likely to come, to real danger. It could be hazardous, but it was
exhilarating.

It's no surprise, then, that aspects of the tour have entered the realms
of cultural mythology. It's widely thought, for example, that the police
responsible for batoning protesters in Wellington's Molesworth St were members
of the famous (infamous?) Red Squad, the elite police team specially formed for
the tour. In fact, the Red Squad was nowhere near Wellington that night.

But there's another aspect of the so-called Battle of Molesworth St that
needs to be clarified.

It's often presented as a brutal, gratuitous attack that came out of the
blue. An article in this paper last Saturday perhaps unwittingly reinforced
that impression. But the truth is that Blind Freddy and his dog could have seen
the confrontation coming, even if the protesters didn't.

I had taken part in the protest rally that preceded the march up
Molesworth St that night. The police had co-operated fully, but then the
protest leaders announced a previously undisclosed plan to march on the South
African consulate. That wasn't part of the deal with the police.

Inspector Bert Hill gave a clear warning of the likely consequences.
"I am sorry, we cannot let you walk on Molesworth St," he said
through a megaphone. "Please do not go onto Molesworth St and block the
street."

The protest leaders ignored him. Only four days before, protesters had
succeeded in forcing the abandonment of the Springbok match against Waikato.
They probably thought they were unstoppable.

But police pride had been seriously hurt at Hamilton and it should have
been obvious that they weren't about to be humiliated again. Their credibility
was at stake.

Small wonder that the night air was soon filled with the sound of batons
striking protesters' heads. Despite opposing the tour, I thought my fellow
demonstrators brought the battering on themselves that night.

* * *

HAYDN JONES, who writes an entertaining column in this paper's Your Weekend magazine, devoted his most
recent piece to the subject of single-income families.

He's the sole earner for his young family and says their one luxury is
that his wife stays at home and looks after the children. They can afford to do
this, because they live in a relatively cheap provincial city.

His Auckland friends put their children into daycare and spend so many
hours at work that they have little energy left at weekends.

Jones laments that often both parents have to work to put food on the
table. He adds: "That's the great New Zealand tragedy."

But is it? I agree that it's sad, but I don't believe parents have no
option.

That may sometimes be the case, but more often it comes down to choice.
It's a tradeoff: Either they have a good car, a flash house, expensive holidays
and modern appliances, or they accept a lower standard of living in return for
the benefits of spending precious time with their children – something they
will never get a second crack at.

Jones and his wife have chosen the latter, and good on them. Plenty of
other young parents could do the same; it's all a matter of expectations.

* * *

WAS THERE ever a sillier euphemism than the expression "to sleep
with" someone, meaning to have sex with them?

I recall reading an interview with Bill Wyman, the most carnally active
member of the Rolling Stones, which referred to him sleeping with 265 women in
three months.

Good grief. They must have been short naps.

Recently, this nonsensical term cropped up again. A columnist in the
British Spectator wrote that the
racing driver James Hunt was alleged to have "slept with" 33 British
Airways stewardesses in two weeks.

This coy phrase dates back to a time when polite people couldn't quite
bring themselves to mention sex explicitly. How it survives in an era when we
insist on being shamelessly blunt about most other things is a mystery.

Friday, August 2, 2013

You don’t have to be an ardent royal watcher (I’m not) to
have noticed that there has been a striking change in the family dynamics of
the Windsor whanau.

The events surrounding the royal birth confirm that the new generation
of royals refuses to be tied by the hidebound traditions of the past – and good
on them for that.

There were a number of pointers which, individually, may
have seemed insignificant. But taken together, they added up to a significant
break from the stuffy dictates of Buckingham Palace protocol.

Take the announcement of the royal birth. In one of those
eccentric rituals so beloved by the British, tradition decreed that a letter announcing
the birth be forwarded from the hospital to the monarch, after which a bulletin
would be posted on a gilded easel outside the palace.Instead, a press release went out by social
media.

The royal couple’s first visitors were Kate’s parents, who
turned up at the hospital in a London taxi. In previous generations, this would
have been seen as an unthinkable act of impertinence. Someone from the royal
family – probably Prince Charles – would have had first visiting rights.

The Middletons, after all, are mere commoners. But Kate is
obviously close to her family and on such occasions, a first-time mother wants
her Mum at her side – not a stiff, awkward father-in-law mumbling platitudes,
as Charles would surely have done.

When the couple left the hospital, it wasn’t in the back of
a chauffeur-driven limo. William placed the baby’s car seat in the back of a
Range Rover then got behind the wheel and drove himself, just as any new father
might have done (except that most new fathers can’t afford a Range Rover).

Royal observers also noted that when the couple of emerged,
it was Kate who carried the baby. In 1981, when the one-day-old William was
presented in public for the first time on the same hospital steps, it was
Charles who held him – leaving no room for doubt as to who was foremost in the
parental pecking order. William and Kate, in contrast, seemed to be signalling
that theirs is a marital partnership between equals.

Perhaps most important, the new addition to the royal family
has not been handed over into the care of nannies, as was the fate of so many
of his predecessors. It appears his parents are determined to raise him in a
domestic setting that’s as close to normality as the dictates of royal life
will allow.

William will take the statutory two weeks’ paternity to
leave to which any new father in Britain is entitled, then get back to work.

There’s a profound generational change taking place here.
William and his younger brother Harry seem determined to do things their own
way, rather than be governed by rigid precedents and pushed around by fussy
courtiers. And who can blame them?

The contrast between Prince Charles and his sons is
striking. Charles is stiff and pompous, though you sometimes get the impression
he desperately wants not to be. He seems incapable of exhibiting any
spontaneity. He was an old fogey by the age of 21and seems imprisoned in the
role history and tradition has assigned him.

His sons, by contrast, are relaxed and strikingly ordinary. They
dress casually and speak with a neutral, middle-class accent. In fact Harry
sometimes seems determined to sound like a working-class Eastender.

It’s as if the two brothers have made a conscious decision
to repudiate, as far as they reasonably can, the trappings of privilege and
tradition. Whatever your opinion of the monarchy as an institution (and bear in
mind it’s not the fault of William and Harry that they were born into it), they
surely deserve some respect for that.

They also deserve the gratitude of the older royals for
helping to restore the image of the Windsors after the family sank dangerously and
deservedly low in the public esteem.

While the Queen has been unfailingly conscientious in
discharging her public duties, her children let “the firm” down badly.Princess Anne and the useless Prince Andrew
both had disastrous marriages – Anne to a philanderer who fathered a child in
an extramarital affair with a New Zealander, Andrew to the erratic Sarah
Ferguson, who turned out to have an unfortunate weakness for wealthy American
businessmen.

Charles’ marriage to Princess Diana unravelled even more
spectacularly. Bullied into the marriage by his domineering father, according
to some accounts, he chose his much younger bride largely on the basis, it
seems, of her breeding potential. (“At least she’ll breed some height into the
line,” Prince Philip reportedly remarked.)

It was a cynical marriage of convenience. All along, Charles
was in love with another woman. He should consider himself extraordinarily
lucky that the British public seems to have forgiven him for being a cad.

The public emotion that erupted after Diana’s death, and in
particular the anger and bewilderment over the Windsors’ apparent indifference
to the tragedy, shook the royal family to its core.

From that time on, the royals became noticeably more
responsive to public opinion. Perhaps they realised that although unelected,
they were still ultimately accountable to the people.

The Queen has since adopted a warmer, less aloof persona. She
can take much of the credit for the fact that the royal family has regained the
popularity it lost in the 1990s.

But William and Harry, too, have helped rehabilitate the
Windsors in the public eye. They have made the family look human.

Given that the two brothers experienced the trauma of their
mother’s death at a sensitive age, and saw at close quarters how cold and
clannishly self-protective the royal family could be, it’s remarkable that they
have emerged so well-balanced.

They could have been excused for rebelling against the
stifling, tradition-bound environment they were born into. Instead they seem to
have made the sensible decision to deal with it on their own terms. In
doing so, they have showed a lot more character than their father.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.